A blog for Small Business Consultants and the vendors who serve them. It contains Opinions on business success, News in the SMB consulting space, and Information on what I'm up to.All material Copyright (c) 2006-2020 by Karl W. Palachuk unless otherwise noted.

8 comments:

You are right. We want to be told what to do. Just like many of our clients. We do not want to make a choice as the choices are endless.

Of course, the other matter...

We want to know that we will have enough cash inflow to pay our bills during the first, second and third months after we jump in with both feet, as we get comfortable with the feel of the "new clothes". Its that fear of losing cash flow that first quarter as we transition.

As mentioned in another post, if we present the "ultimatum" to our existing clients, we may lose half or more of our client base at the start.

We have seen many VARs make the transition to Managed Services within 30 days. However, a company needs to be able to play both offense and defense in the early days of the transition with their existing install base of customers. Net new customers are the easiest to turn on within the first 30 days because there is not a fall back position.

A story that I have shared with many others as they start to make their MSP journey is when I went to Home Depot to buy a shovel one day. I asked the sales rep where the shovels were? As he pointed me in the direction of the sholves he started asking me questions about the type of hole that I wanted to dig? As we turned the corner, I understood why he needed clarity as we turned to face the more than 30 shovles on the wall. The moral of the story is have a clear understanding of your job and the end result you seek before you choose a tool.

Mark: There are a lot of people who never really implemented managed services. They sat on the fence for three or four years and never made any money.

On the flip side, there are many companies that are thanking their stars they had managed services in place when the economy went to hell. We have guaranteed annuity income every month.

We've seen a dramatic decrease in project (discretionary) work. But so has everyone else. In terms of managed service clients: Their stuff just works and we have essentially nothing to do except polish monitors.

So right now we have very little work and the guaranteed income. At the same time, clients have guaranteed stability and predictable flat fees.

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I make every attempt to honestly state what I believe and enjoy the freedom of posting whatever I feel like on this blog. This is a big complicated world and I have many interconnected personal and professional relationships.

I may in some way receive money or other benefits from any of the products, services, or companies mentioned in this blog as a direct or indirect result of my actions on and off this blog. Any experience mentioned here is just my experience and I have no knowledge about whether it represents a typical experience with any products, services, or companies mentioned.

Whenever it is possible to have both an honest and a misleading interpretation of my statements, please assume honesty. Thanks. - karlp